Articles - the basics

Articles contain the most current information published in a field of study.

Most professors and researchers prefer articles that are "scholarly" in nature. Characteristics of scholarly journals are that they have the following qualities:

The articles contain original research (such as scientific experiments, surveys and research studies)

A list of references or sources is provided at the end of each article

An editorial board, composed of experts in the field, reviews articles to decide whether they should be accepted; this is also known as "refereed," "peer-reviewed," "professional," or "academic".

Uses a specialized vocabulary for that field.

Contain few if any advertisements. If included, they are highly specialized and specific to scholarly discipline (i.e. specific laboratory equipment, medical tools and drugs).

If you are uncertain about the scholarly nature of a journal, you all look up the title or ISSN in the periodical database Ulrichs Periodical Directory (UlrichsWeb). This database will tell you about the journal including the nature, it's audience, and in which databases it is indexed and abstracted.

The Library Catalog contains the titles to all of the print and electronic format journals that we subscribe to. The Catalog does not list the articles within the journals. The individual articles can be found in article databases.

Citation searching: If you have a citation to an article, the easiest way to locate the article is to look up the title of the journal in the catalog. Identify whether we own the journal and the format, print or electronic. If in electronic format, do we have that year/volume? If yes, you can click on the link provided to go directly to the online articles and find the one you need. If it is not online, do we have it in print? If so, identify the call number and go to the stacks to find the proper volume and issue. If we do not own the journal or issue, you can request the article through Interlibrary Services.

According to EBSCO, Environment Complete™ offers deep coverage in applicable areas of agriculture, ecosystem ecology, energy, renewable energy sources, natural resources, marine & freshwater science, geography, pollution & waste management, environmental technology, environmental law, public policy, social impacts, urban planning, and more. Environment Complete contains more than 1,957,000 records from more than 1,700 domestic and international titles going back to the 1940s (including 1,125 active core titles) as well as more than 120 monographs. The database also contains full text for more than 680 journals, including many of the most used journals in the discipline, such as Environment (back to 1975), Ecologist, Conservation Biology, etc. Additionally, Environment Complete provides full text for 120 monographs, such as Encyclopedia of World Environmental History (3 volumes), Advances in Water Treatment & Environmental Management, etc.

GreenFILE offers well-researched but accessible information covering all aspects of human impact on the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles include content on the environmental effects of individuals, corporations and local/national governments, and what can be done on each level to minimize negative impact. Topics covered include global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. GreenFILE is multidisciplinary by nature and draws on the connections between the environment and a variety of disciplines such as agriculture, education, law, health and technology. The database provides indexing and abstracts for approximately 295,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 4,600 records. Coverage: 1973 to present. Ebscohost platform.

The Garden, Landscape and Horticulture Index is a popular and scholarly index to over 300 journals on gardening, horticulture, landscape design, botany, ecology, plant conservation, garden management, and horticultural therapy.

1995-
ScienceDirect (from Elsevier) provides access to the full text of over 2,000 journals, from 1995 to present (with extended coverage for some titles). It also contains electronic books. Coverage includes strong content in the physical sciences. Personalization options for table of contents alerts, saving searches, etc., are available.

Includes the Institute for Scientific Information Citation Indexes - Arts and Humanities, Social Science, and Science. It indexes science, social sciences, and arts and humanities information from nearly 9,300 of the most prestigious, high impact research journals in the world.

Article Databses - 2nd Choices

Organic.Edunet
Or, "Organic.Edunet: A Multilingual Federation of Learning Repositories with Quality Content for the Awareness and Education of European Youth about Organic Agriculture and Agroecology". The Organic.Edunet project aims to facilitate access, usage and exploitation of digital educational content related to Organic Agriculture and Agroecology. This will be achieved by deploying a multilingual online federation of learning repositories, populated with quality content from various content producers. An multilingual online environment (the Organic.Edunet Web portal) will facilitate end-users’ search, retrieval, access and use of the content in the learning repositories. Today, the Organic.Edunet Web portal provides access to 10515 resources, from 11 institutional collections and 2 user communities.

Organic Eprints
Organic Eprints is an international open access archive for papers and projects related to research in organic food and farming. The archive contains full-text papers in electronic form together with bibliographic information, abstracts and other metadata. It also offers information on organisations, projects and facilities in the context of organic farming research. The Organic Eprints archive is a tool to further develop research in organic agriculture. The main objectives are to facilitate the communication of research papers and proposals, to improve the dissemination and impact of research findings, and to document the research effort.

PlantFacts
Horticulture and crop science information from 46 different colleges, universities, and government institutions across the United States and Canada. This searchable site run by the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, The Ohio State University provides access to over 260,000 pages of Extension fact sheets and bulletins from every land-grant university in the U.S. and several government institutions across Canada. Try this resource even for non-plant research queries as their "plant" filter is porous.

FAOSTAT (MSU only)
FAOSTAT is an on-line and multilingual database currently containing over 1 million time-series records covering international statistics in the following areas: Production, Trade, Food Balance Sheets, Food Aid Shipments, Fertilizer and Pesticides, Land Use and Irrigation, Forest Products, Fishery Products, Population, Agricultural Machinery. The service provides extended on-line query and download limits (10,000 records per query) and unlimited access to FTP bulk download files. A copy of this data is also available on CD-ROM in GD/SSHR of the Main Library.

FAO Corporate Document Repository
The FAO Corporate Document Repository houses FAO documents and publications, as well as selected non-FAO publications, in electronic format. It enables users to easily access the accumulated knowledge and information produced by FAO directly on the Internet.
To view the new publications added to the repository in the last month, see new documents.
The advanced search provides the user with the means to carry out a specific search, by querying a particular field or combination of fields. There are three distinct advanced searches, one for meeting documents one for publications, such as books and journals, and one for articles.

Data and Statistics

FAOSTAT is an on-line and multilingual database currently containing over 1 million time-series records covering international statistics in the following areas: Production, Trade, Food Balance Sheets, Food Aid Shipments, Fertilizer and Pesticides, Land Use and Irrigation, Forest Products, Fishery Products, Population, Agricultural Machinery.

Ag Data Commons (ADC) provides access to a wide variety of open data relevant to agricultural research. It is a centralized registry for data already on the web, as well as a repository for new data being published for the first time. Ag Data Commons hosts datasets, databases, software, and multimedia, as well as the documentation explaining these data products...

These data are open, meaning they can be re-used free of charge and with few or no restrictions. If there are any restrictions on a dataset’s re-use (such as a requirement for attribution), these will be made explicit in the “License” and “Public Access Level” fields of the ADC record.
A wide range of research domains related to agriculture are covered. Some examples are agronomy, genomics, hydrology, soils, veterinary and animal sciences, agroecosystems, sustainability, and economic statistics.
Data files on ADC are made available via direct download, or as a pointer to an external link. Data is hosted in the form in which it is submitted to ADC. Most of the data on ADC was generated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and university researchers with USDA funding support. Datasets and tools are often associated with scholarly publications, but association with scholarly publications is also not a requirement for submitting to ADC.

From Frequentist to Bayesian, biostatistics to finance, this fully searchable collection is the perfect tool for any size analysis on all sorts of data. To search STATSnetBASE titles, choose “Advanced Search” upon connecting to CRCnetBASE and limit your search to the “Statistics” Subject collection.

A searchable database of import and export data from over 130 countries that provide the United Nations Statistics Division with their annual international trade statistics, detailed by commodity and partner country. For many countries the data coverage starts as far back as 1962 and goes up to the most recent completed year.

Provides statistics and government forecasts covering such topics as resources devoted to research and development, patent families, the technology balance of payments, international trade in highly R&D intensive industries, and research and development (R-D) expenditures. Select "Browse by Theme" and select 'Agriculture and Food'.

International agricultural market, production and trade data and reports. See also the Global Agricultural Trade System. GATS includes international agricultural, fish, forest and textile products trade statistics dating from the inception of the Harmonized coding system in 1989 to present.

HarvestChoice generates knowledge products to help guide strategic investments to improve the well-being of poor people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia through more productive and profitable farming. Products include publications, numeric and GIS datasets on households, markets and production. Includes a Data Rescue Initiative to digitize agricultural census reports and data files from Sub-Saharan Africa.

HarvestChoice mines the latest data sources from global databases, literature, national household surveys and agriculture censuses; using a variety of techniques, cropping system and economic models, statistical analyses, and geospatial tools, HarvestChoice harmonizes data into a standardized, geo-tagged database, informally dubbed the “CELL5M” (a matrix of 5 arc-minute grid cells). Through the newly released HarvestChoice data API, programmers can access our data and methods to describe, query, and aggregate data to suit their own purposes.

The Yearbook "World of organic agriculture" documents recent developments in global organic agriculture. The book has been published annually since 2000. A central part of the book are the organic agricultural statistics, which are collected annually in the frame of the annual survey on organic agriculture worldwide. The project is currently funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), the International Trade Centre (ITC), and NürnbergMesse.